Taming My Inner 5-Year-Old

In recent years while dieting, I often used the analogy that my inability to stick to plan was like a willful 5-year-old throwing a tantrum. I told myself that I needed to discipline that five year old and “force” her to just behave and stick to the rules. I’d berate myself and try to just white knuckle my way through whatever it was I was struggling with, but it rarely worked. And really, should that have been a surprise? I’m not a parent, but I’ve got enough nieces and nephews and godchildren that I know that bullying a 5-year-old is rarely an effective way to get her to do anything, at all.

Today, out of curiosity, I checked out the Supernanny website to see what England’s most famous nanny recommends for children throwing tantrums. The first thing I discovered is that the Supernanny website is apparently run by a bunch of different “experts” and apparently has no little input from the actual Supernanny. But those quibbles aside, here’s what the experts said about tantrums.

Causes of tantrums:

• Frustration
• Hunger or tiredness
• Wanting something the child can’t have
• Wanting independence
• Over stimulation
• Attention seeking
• Emotional overload

Hmmm, these all sound pretty darn familiar. Diets frustrating? What, all the time spent preparing calorically perfect meals, figuring out what I can and can’t eat, and following the long lists of dos and don’ts? How could that be frustrating? Hunger? Yeah, when wasn’t I hungry when I was dieting? Tiredness? How could I not be tired when I was starving all the time? I had no nutrition for energy! Wanting something I couldn’t have? Yeah, food!! Wanting independence? Who wouldn’t want independence from all those rules? Over stimulation? Well, let’s see, read this book, log this food here, do this exercise at this time and log that and calculate the calories burned to figure out how much I can eat and figure out the exact calorie count of everything that passes my lips and get enough sleep and drink 10 glasses of water a day and eat 5 fruits and veggies, but don’t eat too much fat salt, sugar, or anything white, but blah, blah, blah. No, that’s not over stimulating at all. Attention seeking? Well, an invisible fat person would never want attention, would she? And finally, emotional overload? Yeah, if I’m stuffing down my feelings with food while also constantly telling myself how fat, disgusting, and undisciplined I am, there is probably a bit of emotional overload going on there.

Seems like the question here is how could my inner 5-year-old NOT be throwing a tantrum when I’m on a diet?

So, what does Supernanny (or her minions) have to say about solving tantrums? Well, there were a handful of tips, but here are the ones that particularly struck me:

Solve the problem before behavior deteriorates. Yeah, dealing with the emotions before I start stuffing my face with food to quiet them might just be a bit more helpful, on many different fronts.

Offer choices. Choices are nice. I’ve always been a tad rebellious. The minute you impose a boatload of rules on me, the minute I want to do the exact opposite. Having choices about what *I* want and what *I* need and not just blindly following what some “expert” dictates, might make me more amenable to engaging in healthy behaviors.

Use positive words. Big one here. No 5-year-old ever flourished by being told how terrible she was. Treating that 5-year-old with kindness and respect even when she’s melting down is probably more effective than screaming at her and threatening her with punishment. And truth be told, while that kind of treatment may have resulted in compliance for a short period, each time my 5-year-old just came back angrier and more defiant than before. So, that apparently doesn’t work too well with anyone.

So what’s the lesson here? Treat your inner 5-year-old just like you would a real live one, and you’ll probably be a lot more successful all the way around. I’m going to give it a try. My inner 5-year-old is smiling at me right now.

Dumping the Diet Books

Yes, friends, it's time. Time to dump the diet books that is. Well, actually, time to donate them to charity. Seems a shame to inflict them on anyone else. I hate to think of some other poor woman (or man) inflicting the same kind of body hatred on themselves that I did when I was following any one of these. But that's my hang up. Someone else may be grateful to find the book they've been looking for at a discount.

So here's the roll call of misery:

1. Body for Life
2. Body for Life for Women
3. Champions Body for Life
4. Eating for Life - the Body for Life cookbook, because the fact that three of the actual diet plan books didn't work for me made me go, if only I had the recipes, that'd make the difference!
5. 100 Days of Weight Loss - It's "the Secret to Being Successful on Any Diet Plan." Yeah, that worked out well.
6. The Dish: On Eating Healthy and Being Fabulous - Autographed copy! Woo hoo!
7. The Great American Detox Diet - By the wife of Morgan Spurlock, the guy who did the film Supersize Me. Great film. But the vegan diet of punishment, not so much for me.
8. The Eat-Clean Diet
9. Flip the Switch - which instructs you, like many books, to lose the excuses and lose the weight! Because I can work full time while putting myself through graduate school, but clearly I'm weak-willed and undisciplined!
10. Ultra-Metabolism - The simple plan for automatic weight loss. Uh huh, that sure whipped my metabolism into shape. Not!
11. The Raw Food Revolution Diet
12. Raw Food Life Force Energy - All I can say about these books is that any person who can do raw food 24/7 is a far better person than I am. Go with god; you officially have a will of steel!
13. French Women Don't Get Fat - Punish yourself in a continental fashion!
14. The Way to Eat - Aren't they all sold as the way to eat?
15. Tired of Being Tired - because apparently, we're all fat because we have adrenal glands that are burned out.
16. Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy
17. Shape Your Life - from the editors of Shape magazine!
18. The Business Plan for the Body - Run your body like a CEO and be a size 2!
19. Marilu Henner's Total Health Makeover - because who else would I look to for the secret of health besides a washed up actress?
20. Our Lady of Weight Loss - Billed as "miraculous and motivational musings from the Patron Saint of Permanent Fat removal." Humorous, perhaps, but also kind of confusing. Guess I figured that if I could be wackier that I'd be thinner??
21. The Volumetrics Eating Plan - fill up on watery foods and finally be skinny! Actually, not all that bad as diets, go, but still wasn't any more successful for me than anything else.

It's a pretty good sized pile, when you look at it. Sad thing is, I'm actually surprised it's not bigger. But I've given away other books in the past. So, it's by no means representative of all the diets I've ever followed. More like all the diets I've followed over the last year (excluding online and self-created diet!). Some of them were wackier than others. Some actually had good information about healthy foods that I've learned from. But the common theme of all of them (for me, anyway) is that they represent the idea that I can't trust myself to eat in a way that is best for my body. That I need some "expert" to tell me how to eat, otherwise I'll be fat forever. I still don't know where IE is going to take me. But wherever it is, it hardly seems like it can be a place that makes me more miserable than I was while following every single one of these diet plans. It'll be interesting to see what I think about this post a year from now and whether or not I think that statement is true.

Feeling Good for No Particular Reason

Just one of those weird days when I feel good and there's no particular reason why. Even stepped on the scale this morning and found out I was five pounds heavier than when I started IE and it didn't phase me a bit. Besides, I'm sure it's at least partly attributable to all the salt I consumed this weekend at my cooking class. I will say that I discovered why prepared food is so full of sodium. No matter how much salt I added, the instructor would toss in a bunch more and stuff never tasted salty, it just tasted better. Salt makes everything taste amazing!

Anyway, it was a crazy day at work. My to do list never gets smaller, only gets longer. But for some reason, I just felt good today. I even went to the gym after work voluntarily and not grudgingly. That never happens! (And found a parking space just down the block without having to circle endlessly. That never happens, either!). The good mood fairies have blessed me today. I have no idea why, but it doesn't matter. I'll just be glad for it. Can't say that it happens all that often.

Cooking Class - Day Two

Another fun (and tiring!) day in cooking class. Today we continued cooking and the dishes were a bit more complex than the day before as we had more time since we didn’t start at the farmers market. I made a Mexican pork and tomatillo stew. It was a lot of work. It took about two and a half hours from start to finish, but I think it wouldn’t have taken so long on my own. Part of it was working in a strange kitchen and working around all the others. But it was all really fun and ultimately very tasty!

And it was a great group. This is the second class I’ve taken at this school and there’s something about getting people together to cook that really breaks down barriers and bonds you. There were a lot of laughs. And the best part is that at the end of each day, you get to taste everything that everyone made. For a bunch of novices, we did really good work.

My masterpiece! Pork & tomatillo stew with purslane and cilantro. Yum!

After hours of cooking, everyone gets to feast on the bounty!

A sample of everything everyone made. This isn't intuitive eating, but it sure was tasty and that's okay!

All in all, it was a really great day. And I'll take that!

Eating In Line With My Values

I’m one of those left coast liberals who shops at Whole Foods, thinks Alice Waters and Michael Pollan are virtual deities when it comes to all things food, and who really, truly believes that organic, free range, wild, and grass-fed tastes better and is better for you. This isn’t to say that I don’t think the occasional guilty pleasure of a fast food meal has its place, but I do think that there’s far too much of it and too little of the healthy stuff on most of our tables.

But here’s the thing, since starting IE, I’ve been in such a rebellious mode. I’ve virtually abandoned my values when it comes to eating. If it’s quick, crappy, and full of empty calories, I’ve been stuffing it in my mouth. Seems I’ve been rebelling not only against diets but also against my own values about what constitutes good food.

Well, this weekend I’m taking a cooking class that’s all about cooking with produce from the farmers market and it’s reminding me of those values that have fallen by the wayside as of late. One of the things about living in California is that it’s really easy to take for granted how lucky we are when it comes to the year-round availability of amazing produce. Farmers markets are prolific in the Bay Area and San Francisco has one of the best in the country, if not the world. I occasionally venture to the farmers markets near my house if I can manage to rouse myself out of bed in time, and those little markets are perfectly good. But the San Francisco Ferry Plaza farmers market is in an entirely different league and I didn’t fully appreciate that until today.

My class started at the Ferry Plaza farmers market and we spent three hours shopping for all the ingredients that we would be cooking over our two-day class. The instructor talked about the different kinds of produce, how to pick and store it, and also had many of the vendors talk to us about the products. I’m a fairly adventurous eater, thankfully. There are definitely things I don’t like, but there aren’t many things I won’t at least try. One of the most amazing things about the class today is that both at the market and later at the class, I kept trying things that I have never cared for and found many that tasted absolutely amazing!

The pluots, which I actually do like, tasted so amazing they almost made me cry. If I could have, I would have bought a bushel of the peaches, which I don’t usually care for all that much. The blue cheese and eggplant, two things that I’ve never liked, were a revelation! In the class, I made a roasted yellow bell pepper soup, which I was certain I would hate, and I almost licked the bowl clean! Seriously, anyone who thinks that conventional produce is just as good as the fresh in-season stuff at the farmers market, is fooling himself. Even Whole Foods, which I love dearly, rarely has stuff that tastes as awesome as everything I tried today. I only wish everyone had access to such beautiful and delicious bounty. I don’t think it’s possible to be a fruit and veggie hater if you could have tasted the stuff I did today.

But that’s not all; the variety of other kinds of vendors at the market was truly impressive. All manner of seafood, meats, cheeses and other dairy products, and baked goods were being sold right alongside the produce. I really could have done almost all my shopping for the week at this market. It sort of made me embarrassed that I have this amazing resource right on my doorstep and that I don’t take advantage of it. Shame on me.

I’m not certain how long this desire to keep eating crappy foods is going to last. I have the feeling that I haven’t quite seen the last of it. But this class has at least revived my desire to eat more of the good stuff and to actually cook it myself (something else that I’ve been avoiding lately). And that’s a very good thing.

How Long Should It Take To Start Getting It?

In the two and a half months since I recommitted to IE, there have been many things I’ve enjoyed about following this path. Chief among them is eating whatever I want without a feeling of guilt. Okay, well, it hasn’t been completely guilt free, but I’m definitely eating with less guilt than I was in the preceding years when I was always either on a diet or feeling guilty because I should have been on a diet but wasn’t. So that’s a positive thing. No argument there.

But there are parts of this that still aren’t coming to me. I’m still struggling quite a bit with stopping when satisfied. And lately, I’m having more trouble with eating when hungry. Partly dictated by my work schedule, but often of my own doing, I’ve reverted to eating by the clock. Because it’s lunch time! Or, last week, when I was traveling on business, because I was in a hotel that had limited room service offerings and it was easier to go out and eat with my colleagues so I could get back to my room to get some work done (and also because I needed a break after a really long day), than it was to go to my room, hang out, and eat later when hunger actually hit me.

Compounding it all, I caved and stepped on the scale this morning and was up almost three pounds. Now, having been a person who previously weighed three times per day, I know that my weight can fluctuate by three pounds within the course of a day, so that’s not necessarily an indication that things are going to hell in a hand basket. But I worry that it’s the start of a slow creep upward and that a year from now I will be 30 pounds heavier instead of lighter. I worry that I’m not giving this the full effort that I should, that I’m making excuses. I worry that my brain keeps saying work the steps but that my hand is in the bag of chips without a second thought (or any thought) when there has been nothing particularly upsetting or frustrating about my day that should drive me to emotional eating. And I worry that I see myself doing this and I simply have no desire to stop and figure out what is driving me to it. What is this resistance? And if I can’t get myself to stop and figure out what it’s about, how am I ever going to get the hang of IE? And what’s to keep me from being fatter this time next year? So how long should it take for me to be able to get to that point where I can stop myself and start to figure this stuff out? I wish I knew.

Argh. This is a frustrating moment. One of many, probably, but that doesn’t make it any better.

My Experience With Intuitive Eating - Part II

My second IE experience was intentional. About 12 years ago, I bought the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch and began putting the principles to work. I was actually making slow but steady progress, and even losing weight, and I remember feeling really good. But for some reason that I can’t remember, I stopped. Knowing myself, I’m fairly certain that it wasn’t working fast enough and I decided to try some diet that promised I’d lose 30 pounds in a week without any effort. Also, that was a time in my life when I was not at all happy (living in a city I hated, no friends, working at a job I hated even more than the city), so I may have just fallen into emotional eating and never looked back. And so the book got packed into a box and tucked away and I went back to the dieting rollercoaster and forgot all about intuitive eating until just this year.

But I do remember how good and how natural it felt to eat this way. And I remember that it actually felt fairly easy, even though it was a slow process. I wish I could say that it felt as easy this time. While I'm definitely appreciating the freedom that not considering any food forbidden brings, I'm struggling with stopping when satisfied in a way I don't remember doing before. Don't know if my memory is just not that great or an additional decade worth of baggage has made the struggle that much more difficult. As a result, I am worried about being able to reach a weight that I’m really comfortable at. And that is probably my biggest fear with regard to IE. I want to make peace with my body, but if that means that I’ll be at this weight forever, then I'm not sure this will work for me. Because I don’t think I can be happy at this weight. I really don’t. But, for now, I'm putting that fear aside, because I have one full year to devote to this and I'm going to see where it takes me. And who knows, in a year from now, maybe my head will be in a different place, even if my body isn't. And a little peace of mind isn't a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination.

My Experience With Intuitive Eating - Part I

This isn’t my first try at intuitive eating. I’ve actually tried it twice before, once intentionally and once unintentionally. Both times were positive, but I ultimately reverted to emotional eating and the dieting mentality.

My first stab and IE was unintentional. I was a French major in college and spent a semester studying in Paris during my junior year. I arrived in the City of Lights as a chubby 20-year-old, but came home the thinnest I’ve ever been as an adult. I didn't realize it - didn't even know what intuitive eating was - but France was all about intuitive eating. At that time, there were no “diet” foods. Saccharine and aspartame were banned so you couldn’t even get a diet soda! You just ate real foods in reasonable portions and walked everywhere you went. I was nowhere near the size of all those svelte Parisiennes, but I was eating sanely and not obsessing about food or diet. More importantly, I was just having fun. And gradually, without even realizing it was happening, I got thinner. I’m sure I would have lost even more weight if I’d spent an entire year there instead of just a semester.

As an interesting aside, I went back to Paris two years ago for the first time since that college experience and they’re not the same French they were when I was there as a girl. While they’ve surely got a long way to go to catch up with the Americans, I saw chubby people every single day that I was there; that was unheard of 20 years ago. This time, I was shocked to see that candy and soda machines were everywhere, including on the platform of every subway station. Twenty years ago, you could have died of starvation before you’d find a candy machine! This time, fast food abounded and I saw people walking around eating. Again, unheard of two decades ago. Back then, people didn’t snack and they ate proper sit-down meals with their families; they didn’t snarf a sandwich on the run. But also just as interestingly, diet products were not hard to find on this trip. The French may not have liked saccharine or aspartame, but splenda is apparently just fine because it was everywhere, as was Diet Coke. And a stroll through the grocery store found as much junk food, as many frozen meals, and almost as many diet products as you’d see in any American store. Apparently, a lot of French people no longer have the time or desire to cook or sit down to enjoy a proper meal anymore either and oddly, they're starting to have a weight problem. Is there a connection, you think? Hmmm... Even more sadly, it seems that we’re spreading our bad habits around the globe, and it shows. Go U.S.A.!

Well, that was my first inadvertent experience with IE. The next time was a purposeful experience. More on that in days to come.

How'd It Go? July Update.

So it’s the end of the first full month of my one-year IE experiment. And the verdict so far? Pretty good, if I do say so myself.

What Went Well

• Scale Free Challenge. Accomplished. Woo Hoo! Went the entire month of July without stepping on the scale even one time. There were days when the urge to weigh was almost overwhelming. But for the most part, without the daily obsession of whether the dial went up or down, I felt calmer. I did weigh this morning, just to see if I’d done any damage and my weight is unchanged. It would have been nice if I’d lost some, but I’ll take unchanged. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty darn happy with unchanged. It does go to show that left to my own devices, I won’t binge myself into oblivion.

• I’m snacking less. I rarely troll for afternoon snacks in the vending machines in my office at 4:00, which had become something of a habit prior to IE.

• Grocery shopping is a joy. I can focus now on what I want and not on calories to tell me if something is allowed. I had the best time at the grocery store yesterday strolling the aisles without guilt and thinking about what I really wanted to eat, not just what was “ok” to eat. Oddly, I find I’m actually buying fewer groceries now than I was pre-IE. That’s because I know that I’m actually eating less (volume-wise), overall. So, I try to buy only what I know I’m going to eat during the week. Before, I was buying tons of things that I was “supposed” to have. And I either ended up eating stuff I didn’t particularly want or like, or just as often, things languished in the fridge until they looked like a science experiment then went in the bin. Now, I buy what I want, and I actually eat it. It’s so much simpler.

What I’m Still Working On

• Stopping when satisfied. The leave one bite challenge has been a dismal failure. I’m still just not able to stop if there’s something good on my plate. I’m managing by trying to take small portions whenever I can, so that I don’t have to stop. But this one definitely needs more work.

• Ready to focus more on nutrition. This month was really about eating what I wanted, even if it wasn’t in excessive portions. But I’ve paid little attention to things like making sure I’m getting adequate fruits, veggies, whole grains, etc. And I feel it. I like the guilt-free aspect of eating what I like, but I’m ready to mix the stuff I want with a bit more of the stuff I need.

• Need to dedicate more time to practicing IE principles. I’m working my way through a number of books on IE and there are many great ideas and things I’d like to work on that I think will help me grasp the principles more easily or quickly. Things like a mindfulness practice, meditation, making sure I pause mid-meal to assess my fullness level (even if I’m not ready to stop eating), etc. So many of my behaviors are hardwired that it’s easy to slip into autopilot and not do the things I want and need to do. In August, I’d like to make sure I’m purposely setting time aside to do the things I know I need to do to be successful at this.

So, I’m pretty happy with month one. I know I still have a long ways to go. But I feel good and calm and actually pretty pleased with myself. After a solid year of frustration trying to diet unsuccessfully (and far too many years on the diet rollercoaster before that), I’m ready to call July a victory. On to August!